If employees can't see a career path for themselves and "they don't see anywhere to move within the company, they get jobs outside of the company.

Succession planning best practices:

Be proactive. Don't wait until someone leaves to look into his or her replacement. Once you have a succession planning program, review it regularly. If it doesn't positively affect retention, it's not working.

Combine efforts. Include talent and performance management and compensation in the succession planning process. Succession planning should be directly linked to areas like training. Invest in software that ties in these processes, and includes a reporting and analytics component.

Enact the plan across the company. Succession planning isn't just for executives anymore: Make sure the plan touches every level of the organization.

BOTTOMLINE: One way to automate succession planning as part of your strategic planning is to adopt Six Disciplines, the first complete business excellence program = optimized for execution. Among the many benefits of its Activity Management System - it automates the succession planning process for your organization.